How Hot is Too Hot?

The best room temperature for your baby's sleep is between 18 and 21 degrees celsius.

How hot is too hot for your baby's bedroom? Here's the short answer: anything above 21 degrees celsius.  Babies are most comfortable sleeping between 18 and 21 degrees.  The rule of thumb to keep them warm is to dress them in one more layer than you feel you need to sleep comfortably. 

But what to do in the summer with no air conditioning?

Therein lies the need for the long answer.

One thing is certain: it is safer for baby to be too cold than too hot. Babies will wake and cry if they're a bit chilly, and you can solve the problem then. But they won't likely do the same if they're too hot. And while I don't like to spark fear, especially when the summertime heat is beyond our control, overheating is a risk factor for SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome). 

If you're one of those parents whose home is just stifling and you can't seem to cool baby's room, here are some ideas and tips to help keep your baby safe and comfortable:

• Dress baby as lightly as possible (see rule of thumb in the first paragraph). Sometimes this could mean nothing but a diaper or just a light, sleeveless sleep sack.

• Keep a fan running on high in the room in the hours before bedtime. Turn it to low, direct it away from your baby and keep it far from his reach before you put baby down.

• Remove any waterproof mattress coverings while the weather is hot as it doesn't breathe as well.

• Invest in good window coverings for baby's room and keep them closed all day with the windows open to prevent the sun from heating the room more.

• If your baby falls asleep in the stroller, keep a close eye as she can easily get too warm in there. And don't cover the stroller with a blanket - this can trap more heat inside.

• If your baby falls asleep in her carseat, keep the car running and air conditioning on. I know, I know, more greenhouse gasses, more climate change and more hot temperatures. But you have a pretty good reason; all those other idlers should get with the program. (And car seats are for cars - don't let baby sleep in the car seat at home.)

• Here's a great idea from Babycenter UK's web site: hang wet towels over chairs and window frames (never over baby's crib railings!) as the evaporating water can cool the air.

• Give your baby a cool bath before bed.

If you think your baby may be too hot, feel his belly; if it feels overly warm or he's sweaty, remove a layer; it's worth waking him for.  Remember that it's normal for your baby's hands and feet to be cooler than the rest of his body, so don't check there.

While we move through the lazy (or busy!) months of summer, don't forget to keep yourself and your baby well hydrated. For babies under 6 months, breastfeeding to meet demand should be sufficient; just be sure she's having a normal number of wet diapers. If your baby is a little older, offer water from a sippy cup more often than usual. 

Giving your baby a cool bath before bedtime can help keep him cool for sleep in warm temperatures.

What’s holding you back?

Sometimes the universe sends us messages. For example, we think about how we really should call that friend we haven’t been in touch with, and an hour later, out of nowhere, we see them driving down the street.  (The message there being, yes, definitely call them.)

If you’re anything like me, you’re a little slow at picking up on these messages and sometimes you pretend you didn’t hear.  It’s an evolved habit to pay attention and listen, and it often takes a big leap to follow where the message seems to be guiding you. But when the same thing keeps popping up over and over from different angles, even my ears perk up.

For me lately the message has been “what’s holding you back?” Whether from a business webinar or a chat with an old friend, the same question keeps coming up. A wonderfully wise American Buddhist teacher I know – Lama Marut – calls this “holding on to our burning coal.”  We want to change or live differently, but we’re not willing to let go of the burning coal in our own hands.  We clutch on to our current ideas and our existing self concepts, despite wanting change.

Change is hard.  Which brings me to the point where I need to make this relevant to babies’ sleep.  :) When your baby has always gone to sleep with a “prop” – on your chest, in a swing, at the breast, on a bottle, with a soother, etc. etc., the day that that has to change (and of course it has to change) will probably be hard for your baby.  There are some gradual ways to warm up to it, to make it less sudden and stressful, but there will still be a big shift one day. 

And human beings don’t like change, by nature. If you don’t believe this, you probably don’t have a two-year-old yet (just try giving them a different spoon at dinner time, I dare you).

The shift is also big for parents, especially mothers.  If baby has a sleep prop, chances are Mom is either somewhat involved or is the outright human pacifier.

There are all sides to the argument of whether sleep training is a dream come true or downright awful (especially online!), and that can make it tough for some parents to make the decision.  Plus, the ones who really need it are sleep deprived, so double-whammy in the decision-making department.

So when you haven’t slept more than a few hours in a row for months (or years!) on end, and you so desperately want sleep, maybe this is a helpful question to ask: what is holding me back? This is always a tough question for us to answer about ourselves.

I’ll start.  My issue isn’t around sleep, but more general lifestyle. What’s holding me back from living the way I want to live?  The answer (I think) is my own negative self talk around the time excuse: “I don’t have time. I’m a working mother of two young children; I can’t.” 

So yesterday I threw dinner into the pressure cooker and went out for a bike ride and we ate a little later than usual. As my mother likes to say, “Your kids are never going to thank you for staying home.” This is in relation to travel, but in this case, they’re not going to thank me for being out of shape and bluesy about it. 

In another example of us banging our parenting heads against the wall for way too long, my husband and I finally read up on how to tackle the incessant mealtime struggle with our three-year-old.  We ordered a book, read the expert advice, started an entirely new approach to eating and suffered through the two-week change phase.

We are now blown away on a daily basis by our child happily coming to the table and eating things she never would have before. It’s shocking.  Kind of like high-fiving your spouse for an entire year after sleep coaching because you still can’t believe your child just accepts the new norm and happily, easily falls asleep in their little bed every night and for every nap.

Time can be a big excuse.  So can money.  We have to first value ourselves to make change.  And we have to be happy ourselves in order to help others be happy.

Anything is possible. We usually just have to listen up, trust and get ourselves out of the way.

Is White Noise Safe For Your Baby's Ears?

I use white noise in my children's bedrooms. I recommend it to my clients to help their little ones get to sleep independently and stay asleep all night.

But is it safe?

Here's the short answer: probably, but it depends.

White noise - like ocean-wave sounds or a fan - can help block out household noise that either prevents babies from falling asleep or wakes them prematurely.  Some say it's a soothing sound that can help lull them into sleep. I'm not so sure about that - we can't ask the babies.

But how much is too much?

It's not clear whether a baby's threshold for noise-induced hearing loss is lower than that for adults, but as a conservative measure, neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) are recommended to keep ambient noise levels to 50 dB-A (a-weighted decibels) or less. (FYI that’s really quiet – the ambient noise in my home with computer on and refrigerator humming is higher than that.)

A recent study published in the medical journal Pediatrics found that of 14 infant-sound machines tested, all of them were able to reach noise levels over 50 dB-A. No surprise there – it has to make some noise.

But what's concerning is that several of them, when placed on the crib rail, were able to produce sounds exceeding 85 dB-A at baby’s level. That's over the limit for adult occupational noise – the level at which hearing damage is known to occur on chronic exposure (picture the guy who spends 8 hours a day operating a jackhammer).

Before you panic and run to turn off the fan in your baby's room, 85 decibels is really loud.

When I first read this study, I did panic, and I did run to turn off the running-water-sound device in my daughter’s room. At the time I read it, she had been suffering from obvious hearing loss (which we had initially thought was selective toddler hearing, until we started testing her by offering chocolate and videos, to no response). Turns out she had a middle ear full of fluid; her hearing resolved as her head cold cleared, but not before I brought up my concerns about white noise with my family doctor.

His immediate thoughts were that a) I was crazy, and that b) the white noise would have to be insanely loud to cause hearing damage. A few days later, he bumped into a colleague specializing in Pediatric Ear Nose Throat and asked her about it.  Her answer was that there was no way my daughter’s hearing loss could have been caused by white noise.

Sigh of relief (and shedding of massive amounts of useless guilt).  But I still turned our white noise down, and I follow the Pediatrics article’s recommendations of keeping the machine on the opposite side of the room from our child’s bed and turning it down or off when my husband and I go to bed and the house is quiet. (See below for the researchers’ recommendations.)

Now, what about creating a dependency on white noise?  I get this question a lot when I recommend it in seminars or to clients.  White noise is not what we call a “prop” – an external person or object (like a pacifier or Mom in the rocking chair) that baby doesn’t know how to sleep without.

It’s also easy to wean.  Once babies have solid sleep skills – they can fall asleep independently and soothe themselves right back to sleep as they stir in the night – you can gradually turn the white noise down over the course of weeks or months.

In the meantime, I am still recommending it. My doctor can probably find lots of other reasons to think I’m crazy.

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Not sure how loud your white noise is?  Download a decibel-meter app on your phone and place it next to your sleeping child while your white noise is on.

Recommendations from the Pediatrics February 2014 study:

1. Place the ISM as far away as possible from the infant and never in the crib or on a crib rail.

2. Play the ISM at a low volume.

3. Operate the ISM for a short duration of time.